


Only the Light Moves

by solnishka1927



Category: Darkest Dungeon (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, M/M, Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-05 23:52:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12199785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solnishka1927/pseuds/solnishka1927
Summary: for a prompt: while in a dungeon, both Reynauld and Dismas are afflicted with abusiveness and tear into each other, dredging up the darkest of each other's sins: Reynauld, for the slaughter he committed during a holy war and for the abandonment of his wife and child; Dismas, for the murder of innocents. The words they hurl are the kind that dig deep and leave no survivors, the kind you can never take back.How can they face each other again, once sanity returns?





	Only the Light Moves

He waits in the tavern, in the upstairs room they sometimes rent for themselves when their lives feel too fragile for dark corners and ruined hovels, when they can’t stand always keeping one ear turned for the sound of footsteps. He waits sitting on top of the bed, his boots kicked into a corner and his belt slung over the backboard, his dirk and pistol sheathed and holstered and out of reach.

His eyes keep straying to them, because he wants them, he needs them, because he’s lived his entire life with his soul teetering along the tip of someone’s knife, someone’s bullet, someone’s sword, and what if someone comes into this room and finds him alone here, what if _Reynauld_ comes in and finds him alone h—

He shivers, half to break the thought before it breaks him, half because it’s cold. His overcoat is in his lap and his fingers can’t stop running over the worn fabric, worrying at its loose threads like a dog at the last piece of gristle on a dry bone, like a child with a toy that is her only talisman against the horrors of the dark… like a broken man with a broken old coat, who knows that the tiny sewing kit in the left inside pocket will mend the bullet hole near the right cuff but not the man he broke less than a day ago. His pistol he can give up, his dirk, his boots, his belt, but not the coat. He can take it off but he can’t take it away, so it stays puddled in his lap between his crossed legs, forlorn, small without its wearer and its wearer small without it.

Barefoot, wearing only shirt and trousers, his bandana pulled down and hanging loose at his throat, the highwayman is gone. In his place is a short man with greying hair and tired eyes and a heart held together with fraying scraps of hope.

Dismas, the penitent thief.

There are footsteps in the corridor beyond the door and Dismas’ hands go still upon the coat, clenching into claws. He’s unable to breathe, unable to tear his eyes from the knob, waiting and waiting and waiting for it to turn as each moment lasts a thousand years and hope and terror each rip his heart to pieces.

The knob turns, the hinges creak, there is the glint of candle-light on armor.

Dismas prays like he has never prayed before, paralyzed, voiceless, begging for a miracle to strike him dead, deaf, blind, anything to save him from this, anything to get him away from here, anything, anything, anything.

Reynauld closes the door behind him.

Despite everything, Dismas’ heart continues to beat. He can’t look up from his hands. Reynauld turns his back on Dismas and faces the wall. There is the noise of metal and leather and cloth moving against each other. His helmet is removed and set aside. His tabard is pulled over his head and let fall to the floor.

Dismas thinks of lunging for the pistol, of ending this somehow, in some way, with a bullet striking someone somewhere and all of this turning to dust and nightmare. He knows that he can’t. He knows that the first time his hand curled around the handle of that pistol he damned himself to facing judgment in this world as well as the next, but he hadn’t thought for jury and judge and hangman to be all a single man and his gallows to be a rented room. He hadn’t thought himself to willingly surrender the pistol. _He hadn’t thought_ , and in his madness he had destroyed—

Reynauld takes off his pauldrons, then his gauntlets. His hands are shaking. He pulls his hauberk over his head with a soft grunt of effort. Dismas’ thigh quivers, half-trained muscle memory telling him to rise, work through layers of metal and get the smell of iron on his fingers, his blood singing and catching fire and turning everything he touches to heated lust.

The chain-mail hauberk lands on the floor with a crash like a gunshot. Dismas flinches. Reynauld sits down to take off his boots. His joints pop when he rises, his age catching up to him, to them, the cold bringing out the first twinges of arthritis and warning them soft as a knife in the dark that their last fight shall be against whatever lies at the heart of this place, that here they will find either redemption or death.

Reynauld turns around. His swordbelt is in his hand, the weapon momentarily sheathed. Dismas cannot meet his eyes, but feels the pull of his pistol like a ship feels the tug of the tide.

They’d come here to find their redemption, though.

They’d come here together.

Dismas shifts aside to make room on the bed. Reynauld leans his sword against the wall and blows out the candle. There is darkness, and the mattress shifting as a weight settles onto it. The blankets rustle. Dismas lets his coat slide to the floor and pulls the covers over himself, curling into the hollow between the sheets but not daring to reach to the other side of it.

The silence stretches out between them like an open wound. Dismas’ throat is raw and burning with all the words he doesn’t say, as well as the ones he did.

He watches the moonlight ooze through the window and glide across the wall opposite. He listens to the soft breathing beside him. Eventually, his eyes close.

Eventually, the moonlight fades away, and the night is dragged below the horizon with it. Dawn comes, pouring into the room silent as faith and golden as hope. Dismas wakes, turns his head, and finds his lover’s eyes looking into his own. His throat still aches, his heart, his bloodied hands, but he goes willing to his jury and judge and hangman. The words spill from his tongue.

“I regret what I said,” he murmurs, voice rough, “I wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t been… lost. I know why you’re here.”

Reynauld breathes deep and nods against the pillow. “And I you,” he says, and closes his eyes again.

Dismas watches him, wants him, but doesn’t reach for him, because the wounds they’ve given each other will only tear open if they try. Words will have to be enough for now, and the peace of the dawn. They can share that. Dismas can be content with that.

Just as he starts to drift off again, it occurs to Dismas that _here_ could have meant the hamlet as well as the rented room they’re sharing. He wonders which one Reynauld answered, then realizes it doesn’t matter—the reason for each is the same.


End file.
